re: MVC Storefront Part 19: Processing Orders With Windows Workflow

Rob Conery has another MVC Storefront post, this time focusing on using Windows Workflow.

Those are my random impressions:

• You probably do want to test your work flow. In the same way you want to have an integration test for the system.
• The sequence work flow seems to be a very heavy weight approach to just orchestrating actions in the application.
• I wonder what the perf implications of creating a workflow here would be. My gut feeling is that this is not good, but I don't really have data for that.
• There is probably an issue here with the WF being run in async, I am not sure where it is getting its threads, but if it is from the thread pool, then it is consuming request handling threads, which can kill a site.

As an aside, here is the checkout workflow:

And here is how I would write this:

ValidateOrder()
AuthorizePayment()
order.Status = OrderStatus.Verified
SaveOrder()

Much easier, I think :-) And even more flexible.